


Grown in the Dark

by Beleriandings



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Emotional Abuse, Gen, Implied Physical Abuse, Mind Manipulation, Not Eöl-Sympathetic, unhealthy family relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-18
Updated: 2015-02-18
Packaged: 2018-03-13 13:01:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3382472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over the years of his childhood, Maeglin come to understand what sort of person his father is a little better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grown in the Dark

The darkness of the forest, he would remember later, was always quiet. Strangely so, although perhaps that was only the years making his childhood memories soft around the edges. Or perhaps it was because the forest was stifling, not a breath of wind making it through the dense leaves.

His mother and his father let him play by the stream – although not too close – and it was here that Lómion liked best. He would lie on his stomach on the grassy bank, placing one hand edge on in the rushing glassy blackness of the water. He would leave it there until his fingers went numb with cold, barely noticing the pain as he watched the play of light and dark water about his fingers, the rippling wake his hand made when he turned it a little in the flow. He could stay like that for hours, barely noticing time passing until his mother or one of the servants were sent to pick him up and carry him inside as the cracks in the leaves above turned from pale blue to deep indigo. He wanted to see them vanish into full black one day, but he was never allowed to, not then.

He liked it best when it was his mother who carried him inside.

He would cling to her, leaving damp handprints on her clothes, pressing her hair to his face and inhaling its smell, his small body sagging with sleep in her arms, and it would make him feel  _calm_ , in a way even the cold water could not.

———

Maeglin remembered the day that his father gave him his name.

He had told him in the morning, when the sunlight filtered down in palid green dimness through the canopy far above, making the crack in the shuttered window flicker with it.

“Maeglin” said Maeglin uncertainly, rolling the syllables around his mouth as he stared up at his father who was sitting in his chair. Maeglin clasped his hands behind his back, unconsciously putting his weight on the balls of his feet, drawing himself up a little taller as he tried to wrap the name around himself, to make its unfamiliar syllables fit. “Maeglin, Maeglin, Maeglin.”

Eöl smiled a little. “Yes, my son. Maeglin son of Eöl. You finally have a name you can be truly proud of.”

Maeglin nodded eagerly, smiling until his cheeks hurt.

———

Maeglin was not supposed to be awake this late at night, but he was.

The grain of the wood was rough under his skin as he pressed his ear to the door. He could hear voices within.

“Eöl. He’s my son as much as he is yours, he’s of the house of Fingolfin whether you like it or not. I… ah… no!” A growl of anger and a muffled thud. “No, not this time, get out of my head, I mean it, I…”

“Ssssh” came his father’s soothing voice, imbued with the tang of the enchantments he used sometimes, twisting them into his words, a thread of power, of compulsion. 

“Eöl…” came his mother’s voice, strangely weakened, pleading and half-breaking.

“Come, Aredhel, my sweet one. Put the matter from your mind, won’t you? Maeglin is better off growing up without all the depravity of your savage race. He has been set off to a bad start by your blood that runs in his veins, but he can still be set upon the right path…” there was a pause, in which Maeglin could hear a shuffling sound, like fabric rustling, he thought. “…After all, you are of the Golodhrim and you are my good, beautiful,  _obedient_  wife, are you not?”

There was a quiet whimper, but no other sound. After a while there came a creak of floorboards, and Maeglin fled from the door and back to his room, fear and confusion rising up in him suddenly from he knew not where.

The next morning, when the pale green light from the gaps in the canopy filtered in through the window, he was almost able to convince himself it had all been a dream.  

———-

“Maeglin my son” said Eöl, looking down at Maeglin appraisingly. Then he sighed and sat down in the window seat, patting the cushion beside him. “Come here.”

Maeglin blinked and went, letting his feet kick against the seat, his legs barely reaching the ground as he looked up into his father’s black eyes apprehensively.

“You know, I trust, of your mother’s… background?” asked Eöl.

“I… a little” said Maeglin hesitantly, thinking of what he had promised his mother.  _Don’t tell your father. Don’t tell him of the stories I tell you, or the language we learn in secret when he leaves. Don’t tell him of the songs that lull you into sleep filled with dreams of light, of Trees, of carefree laughter of children in a city of bright stone. You must not tell him._   _Promise me, Lómion._

She would not tell him why Maeglin should not tell Eöl these things.  _He does not need to know_ , was all she said.  _He would be… displeased._  A cloud would run across her face then, but after a moment it would disappear, as quickly as it had come, and she would kiss his cheeks and pull him into her warm arms.

“You know then” said Eöl, “that she is of the race of the kinslayers. Her own brother, your uncle, spilled the blood of our kin upon the shore of the sea.”

Maeglin’s eyes widened, thinking of the neat family tree his mother had drawn for him in ink as black as poison berries on the back of an old inventory table. He thought of her three brothers, their names running through his head. One of them was dead, he knew. The other ruled a city of his own, the other still was prince in the north, though he could not remember the name of the place. None of them had sounded to Maeglin like they could do such things from her telling. _But if his father said it then it must be true…_

“I didn’t know that” admitted Maeglin.

“It’s true” said Eöl. He sighed heavily, taking Maeglin’s chin in his hand and turning his face this way and that. “There is much she has not told you, I am afraid. Your mother, of course, has long fallen out of her cruel ways, tamed perhaps through love of me, and of you.” He looked far away for a moment. “Alas, one cannot know her mind, not truly. She is a strange creature, but beautiful and good in a wild way, I believe. I knew as soon as I saw her that it was not too late for her, I could salvage her heart. She is the type to need a firm hand, I fear.”

Maeglin looked up at his father, feeling foreboding once more. “What do you mean…?”

“No need to look so afraid, Maeglin my boy! I was never cruel to her, and all I did was for her own good. Such beauty should not go to waste amongst the savage Golodhrim! But the fact remains, in Aredhel’s veins runs that same wild blood.” He grew suddenly serious. “And, I am given to tell you, Maeglin… you must be extra careful with yourself, for it runs in your veins too.”

“Mine…?”

“Yes. Now, now, I am not reprimanding you! I am only telling you to be careful. Should the wildness ever… rise in you… should you ever want to break away from all that I have taught you - ”

“I would never!” burst out Maeglin. He could not imagine killing his kin, any more than he could contemplate what would drive anyone to such an act of violence. “I promise!”

“Good” said Eöl seriously. Then his face lightened. “You’re not like them, are you? You’re like me. You’re a good boy.”

“Yes, I am” said Maeglin, nodding fervently. “I promise I will be like you for ever and ever.”

———

The first time he stepped outside the forest, the light hurt his eyes. It was winter and the ground was grey-brown, all the colours washed out. The river looked different, he thought in amazement, as it flowed out of the eaves of the wood. It had _colour_ ; a deep, rich brown, the dark green streaks of water weed. The water was no longer just black and glassy. He wondered if it felt the same. For a sudden, wild moment, he wanted to lie on his stomach on the bank and let his hand trail in it, as he had when he was younger.

“Come along, Maeglin” came his father’s voice, breaking into his thoughts like cracking glass. “We must be on our way. My friends amongst the Khazad are expecting us before nightfall; we are to dine at the high table of the lord of Nogrod.”

Maeglin blinked, pulling his pack back onto his shoulder where it had slipped down. “Yes father.” He trotted after Eöl.

After they had cleared the trees and gone a little way down the hill, he could not resist turning back ( _and how small Nan Elmoth looked_ , he thought,  _barely more than a little stand of dark trees, smudge of shadow_   _all alone in the wide rolling lands around_ ). He saw a flash of white then, a shape that quickly vanished. A figure, watching them go.

His mother.

She looked washed out in the light, he thought with a sudden stab of pain, wanting almost to go back.

Instead he turned back to the path and followed his father.

———

One day, when they left the wood, it snowed. The flakes fell on Maeglin’s upturned face as he stared up into the sky the colour of a fading bruise, entranced by the soft cold kisses that rained down on his cheeks. It was damp snow, the kind that does not remain on the ground, but still Maeglin stared up at it in childlike wonder, heedless of the fact that he was older now and his father would want him to be dignified. He was struck suddenly by the memory of his mother’s tales of the Ice; had it been like this? Surely not. He was barely cold at all in his thick furs and warm boots, and he certainly could not imagine anyone  _dying_  out in this light shower of swirling, dancing flakes that melted on his lips and clung to his eyelashes.

“Come, Maeglin.”

He followed his father, as he always did, but as he turned away, he looked back once more. It was a habit he had now.

As always, she was there watching him, a small smile on her face, thought he could see pain there too, raw and sharp.

In the milky light, he could see the dark shadows under her eyes all too clearly.

———

There were bruises on his mother’s arms, sometimes. She wore clothes with long, tightly fitted sleeves to cover them, but Maeglin could see them at her wrists, peeping from beneath the fabric, fresh purple and blue and fading yellow.

He had always been good at noticing things, his father said.

He never spoke of them.

There were many things of which Maeglin did not speak, now; he was older, and thus, he reasoned, he should think and watch more than he spoke. He had learned long ago not to speak of what was in his heart to his father. Only to his mother did he confide his hopes, and only then in the very dead of night. The best time for voicing forbidden things, he always thought.

Ever his father’s words rung in his head, mixed with those he had imagined, those that hung in the air unsaid between them;  _you are not like them, Maeglin. You don’t want to be like them, do you? You’re a good boy. You would never betray me. You’re not a traitor like they are._   _Are you?_

The words sparked a quiet rage inside him now, glowing like red coals that burn slowly but refuse to quite go out.

 _What if I don’t want to be like you, father?_ said a small but persistent voice in his head, a rebellious spirit that grew louder within him by the day.  _What if I want to be like them? What if I_ am _like them?_

He whispered words in the forbidden language of his mother’s youth to himself before he fell asleep at night.

 _One day_ , he would think, just before sleep claimed him. One day, he would get out of here, and then he would need those words to talk to the people that had lived in those stories, his mother’s brothers, her father and cousins. One day he would meet them, and the people and the language, all at once, would be  _real._

He had to believe that it was true.


End file.
